Spreadsheet application users are utilizing spreadsheets in more and more sophisticated ways. While spreadsheets were once primarily used to facilitate financial and technical calculations and analyses, users are demanding the ability to create and invoke user-defined functions within spreadsheets. Often, spreadsheet applications are used to create functioning spreadsheet objects that can be accessed over the Internet.
On a basic level, a spreadsheet is ultimately a programming tool. The cells of a spreadsheet can be used to store both data and formulas for manipulating data. However, unlike more sophisticated programming environments such as BASIC, C++, and Pascal, conventional spreadsheets provide no means to implement functional components (automation objects) residing outside of the spreadsheet. With the ever-expanding popularity of object-oriented programming models, valuable programming tools have been made available in the form of discrete, stand-alone automation objects. With the advent of component management systems, such as the Component Object Model, marketed by Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., such objects are generally readily accessible to other objects through the component management system.
Unfortunately, conventional spreadsheet applications have not provided access to external objects. As a result, conventional spreadsheets have served a limited role as a programming tool, as compared to the more sophisticated programming environments mentioned above. Therefore, there is a need in the art for a spreadsheet component that can be used to create a spreadsheet object that can access external objects through a component management system. The spreadsheet object should be able to process formulas that invoke external objects and store objects in the cells of the spreadsheet object. The spreadsheet object also should process formulas invoking the external object after the object has been stored in a spreadsheet cell and should recognize an object as a new data type.